Ultramontane No. 04

The Godfather: Wade Simmons

March 2nd, 2012

There you have it. Everyone can rest easily, it finally snowed down in the city again… And it’s gone already. While we have been dealing with a somewhat low snow-line the past couple days there have been a select few riders on a select few trails having a choice time. With that being said, there also have been some amazing powder days going on up in the alpine regions, or so I have heard. — For real though neither of us have had done any snow sports since the last snowfall.

Connor and I have been on a hunt for great low elevation riding for this exact situation. We slogged through the brush harder than the original crew of Captain George Vancouver’s ship when it first hit the shores of this fine city. Exploration, on a full time level with camera gear and bikes and the bounty came in the content for this release. The best part about this is nothing ended up even looking like we were too far into winter… well that and winter only really hit on Wednesday, which is basically when we called it wraps for shooting.

Regardless of the slogging and low elevation trails we will still we try to get out and have some snow into the next episode if it can manage to stick around long enough. We’re not trying to take the easy route out with this whole winter riding concept… there just really shouldn’t be a full on ‘off-season’ when there is still so much to ride.

Pt. 02 — Ultramontane & Company Presents: Wade Simmons

I hope everybody hit up their DVD and VHS collection to get caught up on this legendary man like I recommended in the last release. Wade Simmons. It was a pleasure to work with him on this release, he’s like a kid in a candy store, except it’s like Wade with a media crew. All he wants to do is just shoot and shoot. There’s honestly so much more footage sitting on our computers from the last couple of weeks with Wade, I mean he’s riding 3 different bikes in this video and they’re all in some sort of similar Wade style. He’s hitting bigger gaps on his XC than he was on his DH rig.

Riding and working with Wade really showed us what it was like to have riding so heavily focused into your life, he was never having a bad time no matter what he was riding or what bike he was on, from fluid descents to technical scratchy uphill climbs I’ve never witnessed somebody so enthusiastic and happy to be riding.

While shooting on the Flatline, Wade took a call from a eager to ride Brett Tippie. Minutes later Tippie was on site and the Fro riders were back in action. It’s pretty awesome when you are shooting two of your childhood heroes making the same product that got us into riding – biking movies. Shooting these two was blast, full of laughs, stories and legendary biking. We are looking forward to working with Wade and Tippie on future projects.

That concludes Ultramontane No. 04 – Our next release will be on March 16, 2012.

Ultramontane No. 04 might be my favourite so far – good times with Wade, and lots of great shots. That little log nose wheelie brings me back to the original Collective. Morgan Taylor went behind the scenes on one of the shoots for this release and interviewed the boys – if you missed that, check it out HERE. And leave your comments below…